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Language, Linguistics and Philosophy
Michael Bulley
The
following article first appeared, in substantially the same form as here, in
the journal Cogito, Vol.13, No.3, Winter 1999.
There, the introduction refers to an article by the same author, entitled
“Language and Philosophy”, that appeared in Cogito, Vol.5, No.3, 1991,
in which Wittgenstein’s “picture-theory” of linguistic meaning is
discussed. This later article is, in
some ways, a follow-up to the earlier one, in trying to provide a more general
bridge between linguistics and philosophy.
In this version, the titles of works are given in full in the body of the
text, rather than by date-reference to the bibliography. The article is reproduced here by kind
permission of Carfax Publishing, Taylor and Francis
Ltd,
Contents
The independence of sentences and
their meanings
This article is an
attempt to bring together the worlds of philosophy and linguistics in a general
way by providing some principles that would underlie any formal analysis of
language.
I
would justify the need for such principles by pointing to the increasing
overlap between the two disciplines in the twentieth century, particularly the latter
half, where you find grammarians justifying their theories through appeals to
philosophical ideas about the nature of language, and philosophers claiming
that some philosophical issues are part and parcel of the linguistic forms in
which they are stated.
I
could not pretend, however, that the ground rules I shall be suggesting here
would satisfy every current theory about language, since there are deep
disagreements both within and across the two disciplines. My own sympathies will become clear as the
article proceeds.
Here
and there I have supplemented my text with quotations from the works of
Wittgenstein. I have done so not with
the intention of validating my own ideas thereby or of explaining
Wittgenstein’s, but rather with the hope that the lucidity of his words may
clarify mine.
The
topics that are covered are: metalanguage, linguistic
self-reference, the definition of a sentence, the principles of analysis,
meaning and context, analysing meanings, analysing sentences, understanding
meanings, the independence of sentences and their meanings, the purpose of
linguistic analysis, the limitations of terminology, the idea of linguistic
acceptability, the reality of language.
One
or two of the ideas in the final section may be found expressed in a different
and longer form in two recent articles (see References), in which I consider
the claim that the structures of human language are genetically innate.
Writing or speech
that has language as its topic has no special status. There is no ‘metalanguage’. When language is the topic, there is not a
different type of relationship between the topic and the language used in
writing about it from that between any other topic and the writing about that. The relationship is not between language and
language, but, as in all other cases, between author and topic.
The
fallacy of metalanguage is discussed by J.W.Miller ( A definition of the thing). He writes, for example: "A higher
language can be a language only as it secures a still higher formulation. That formulation saves it from being an
object....But no assertion of the sort ‘This object is a language’ is ever
possible."
Whereas people can
say things about themselves, words cannot. What you understand directly from a
piece of language, therefore, is not anything about it, such as its function;
what you understand from it is what it means.
Nothing in language can be its own topic. For, if it must be true that
one and the same thing can be referred to by two identical sentences, this
would be impossible if each of two identical sentences referred to itself and
not to the other one. A more formal
explanation may be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
after the statement "No proposition can make a statement about
itself" (3.332).
The
whole discussion about self-referring sentences could be disposed of if it can
be agreed that, when we say that some words refer to something, that is just a
misleadingly shorthand way of saying that, through those words, some person
refers to that thing. It can no more be
said that words can refer to themselves than that they can have wishes. Wittgenstein argues (Zettel,
691) that the correct response to anyone claiming that some sentence containing
the words "this sentence" is self-referring is to ask "Which
sentence?". I would extend
Wittgenstein’s criticism and ask also "Who said so?".
Although
schoolchildren may be given grammatical conditions to help them write
well-formed sentences, it is better for linguistic analysis to have a more
elastic definition based on meaning, so that something taken as the expression
of a complete idea may be called a sentence.
Let us therefore define as sentences the divisions of a piece of writing
or speech into its smallest parts that each make complete sense. The function of a sentence is to produce its
meaning, which it does when it is understood by someone.
To
see how this definition might work, take the conversation: A: Where was the
duck? B: On the pond. There, I would call B’s reply, On the
pond, a sentence, whereas if the reply had been The duck was on the pond
I would not say that the last three words were a sentence.
A
sentence may be thought of either as something that has occurred uniquely in a
particular context or as something that has occurred, or might occur, in more
than one context. We need not think that
there are, for that reason, different categories of sentences, but what we must
understand is that sentences are real and are things we hear, speak, read and
write, and are not abstractions of speech or writing, as if they were some
purer form of their realization.
Language is what it is and should not be imagined different to satisfy a
linguistic theory about it.
It may be useful to
state here that, for the sake of logical consistency, I shall always be using
the word “different” of separate things between which you wish to distinguish
and the word “identical” of separate things between which you do not wish to
distinguish. I shall not be using “identical” to refer back to one and the same
thing.
An
aim of analysis is to assign comprehensible terms to the resultant parts. With the proviso above about “different” and
“identical”, we can give the main principles of analysis briefly as follows: one
and the same thing cannot be described by different terms in one and the same
description, and things you wish to regard as different from each other cannot
be described by the same term; so a term describes only what you apply it to
and you cannot say that terms you give to things you regard as different are
identical terms.
The function of any
part of a sentence cannot be known without your knowing the whole sentence and
the context in which it was understood. If
a sentence has topics, what it says about them is what the meaning, or part of
the meaning, of the sentence is. Part of
such a sentence that simply refers to a topic has no meaning. So, for example, in the sentence William
defeated Harold, there are topics (for example, the person ‘William’) and
what is said about them is, in whole or in part, what that sentence means, but
in that sentence the word ‘William’ has no meaning. Except where a word is itself a sentence, it
has no meaning. ("A proposition is
articulate. Only facts can express a sense; a set of names cannot" -
Wittgenstein, Tractatus 3.141).
The
meaning of a sentence is produced, not by an accumulation of the functions of
its parts, but by their combination in the sentence as a whole. The function of a part of a sentence can be
known, or deduced, only when the sentence has produced its meaning. Nothing that can be part of a sentence,
therefore, can have an inherent function unless it occurs only in one sentence
that always has the same meaning. If we
imagine that the understanding of a sentence is a sort of process or event that
produces results and that those results constitute the meaning, then even if
the difference in results is only in the number, rather than the type, then we
can still say that something that can be part of a sentence can have a
different function on different occasions.
Just
as a part of a sentence has no function in producing meaning except in the
whole sentence, in the same way a sentence has no meaning except in a context;
and so no sentence has an inherent meaning unless it can occur only in one
context. A sentence that is different
from another is capable, depending on the context, of having a meaning that is
different from the other’s.
For
one sentence to be in a different context from another is not grounds for
saying that the sentences are different from each other and, since no sentence
has an inherent meaning, identical sentences might have different meanings in
different contexts, and one and the same sentence might have more than one
meaning in the same context, whether it was intended to or not by the speaker
or writer of it.
There is a
distinction in kind between expressing the meaning of a sentence in some other
way and describing or analysing the meaning of a sentence. For linguistic analysis, descriptions of
meanings must be expressed using the terminology of concepts. They cannot be descriptions of the physical
states of those who understood the sentence.
To
provide different descriptions for all possible meanings within language cannot
be an aim of linguistic analysis. The
meanings of some sentences may be imagined as analysable into concepts. The description we may give to one such part
can be called its term. The purpose of the
analysis will determine what can and should be given terms and which parts are
to be regarded as identical with each other.
Identity and difference among terms will correspond exactly with
identity and difference among parts of meanings.
Understanding
a sentence implies the consequences of perceiving it. A sentence’s meaning therefore is all the
direct effects of perceiving the sentence.
Strange though it may sound, therefore, we may say that meanings happen
in the brain but, although we might imagine the descriptions of meanings as
descriptions of neural occurrences, it is certainly not possible at this time
in history to make such descriptions that could be understood as being those of
the meanings of sentences. I suspect too
that it will never be feasible.
Whereas concepts
are not real things, sentences themselves are real and perceptible. The analysis of a sentence must leave no
doubt, therefore, about the spatial or temporal arrangement of the parts it describes,
whereas the description of the meaning of the sentence will simply show how the
concepts are related to each other.
To
provide different descriptions for all perceptibly different sentences cannot
be an aim of linguistic study. Since the
terms will depend on your understanding the meaning of the sentences, it may be
that you will wish to regard some perceptibly identical parts as different from
each other or perceptibly different parts as identical with each other, in
which cases they will respectively have different terms or share the same term.
The
descriptions of sentences are independent of those of meanings and vice-versa.
This can be inferred from what has been said above, but may be summarized as
follows (though perhaps in a way not suited to ordinary language): unless no
sentence has a meaning that can be described identically with that of a
different sentence, a sentence whose meaning has the same description as that
of a different sentence can have a different description from that of the other
sentence.
In
the analysis of a sentence (not of its meaning) anything may be taken as one
part of it, provided that one and the same part is not taken as more than one
part for each description of the sentence.
So, one part could contain, divide, be contained by and be divided by
other parts. You cannot regard a part of
a sentence as different from itself; and so in any one analysis you cannot give
it different terms. The term you give to a part of a sentence will show what
you wish to say about that part for that description of the sentence. Different descriptions of the same sentence,
where different terms may be given to the same part from one description to the
other, cannot be joined together to make a single description of the sentence.
The guiding
principle of semantic analysis is that there are no inherent meanings. Languages have variety and they change -
probably because humanity is various and changes - and while senses may seem to
stick to words for a time, there can be no predicting how words are used.
("One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and
learn from that." - Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
340.)
Synchronistic analysis
can serve some purposes, but cannot give the true picture. There has, in the latter half of the 20th
century, been a blindness among some influential writers on language to the
chanciness, necessary inefficiency and aesthetic causes that make language what
it is, and this blindness has come from a drive to rationalize the nature of
language by tying a theory to it. Yet
theories are not what language-study needs.
There is a huge fund of linguistic data, and our better understanding of
it will come, not from the straitjacket of a theory, but from percipient and
illuminating explanations of how it comes to be as it is. The mistaken view I have referred to above
has led to the idea that your understanding of a sentence is compelled by the
structures of language. The correct
view, in my judgment, is that it is a result of the interrelation of many of
your experiences up to that moment.
In
this context the word ‘understanding’ is used neutrally; it does not exclude
‘misunderstanding’. When the two are contrasted, that brings in the intention of
the writer or speaker, and the meaning of the sentence then could be defined as
the intention of its originator. Interesting though the problems are that this
raises, it seems better to take the sentence as that which brings about what it
expresses rather than as that which is brought about by what it was intended to
express.
In
the definition of meaning, therefore, we are concerned neither with objective
descriptions of physiological realities nor with descriptions that may arise
from subjective reflections about ourselves as the originators or receivers of
sentences. What is more important to clarify is that, although we commonly
speak of a sentence as ‘having a meaning’, there is, of course, nothing in a
sentence other than what it physically consists of. A sentence does not contain its meaning. This may seem a trite thing to say; yet some
writers on language appear to assume that meanings inhere in sentences,
particularly those who claim that meanings and sentences can be shown, through
procedures of analysis, to be interdependent. This claim reveals a mistaken
view of the nature of language and of how language is understood. The correct
view, as it seems to me, is put by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus,
albeit in considering a hypothetical language whose structures are limited to
the unambiguous expression of possibilities of physical reality. ("The proposition includes all that the
projection includes, but does not include what is projected. A proposition does
not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing
it.... A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its
sense." - Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.13).
Formal
semantic analysis requires comprehensible comparisons among meanings. There must therefore be sufficient
generalization together with an exactitude of terminology. Formal semantic analysis is therefore limited
in its scope. We may be able to be exact
about generalizations when the topics are external physical objects; we are
less likely to achieve much precision when they are emotions, and formal
analysis of this sort is almost certainly going to tell us nothing of what is
important in the meanings of works of literary art. This is not to deprecate formal analysis, but
simply to indicate what its limitations must be.
The independence of
sentences from meanings implies a necessary independence of their
analyses. The two may be set against
each other, or side by side, to see how the language works, but any fusion or
linking of the two must be theoretically ill-founded; nor can there be
predictions from one to the other. This
principle seems to me well expressed by Daneš (Travaux Linguistiques
de Prague): "... strict differentiation of the two levels (syntactic
and semantic) is indispensable. That
does not mean a separation of levels, but only a methodological step which
enables us to ascertain their systemic interrelation."
This
independence does not imply that a sentence and its meaning are separate phenomena. Meaning is implicit in understanding, just as
number is implicit in counting; and it is the physical form of the sentence
that is the object of your understanding.
Understanding a sentence therefore is the same as understanding what it
means. Our everyday usage would be more
illuminating if, rather improbably, we talked, not of ‘the meaning of the
sentence’ but of the sentence ‘being its meaning’, rather like saying ‘virtue
is its own reward’. Some influential
theories of the fairly recent past have held, by contrast, that there are
logical connections, that can be formulated, between form and meaning. While,
indeed, your understanding of a sentence will determine how you analyse it,
that is a far cry from saying that the form of the sentence is derivable from
some other structure coming from your rationalization of the sentence’s
meaning.
On the assumption
that the point of linguistics is our understanding language better, we must
count it as illogical to say at any time that it is because we know we have got
closer to understanding it perfectly that we know we now understand it
better. It would be illogical therefore
in deciding between explanations in linguistics to say that one was better than
another on the grounds that it gave a better account of the nature of
language. That could not correctly be a
reason, but only a logical consequence if you were right. Since language is not hidden, we are not
seeking in linguistics an accurate description of it, since that would merely
be the closest copy. What we are seeking
are descriptions that help us to understand it better, or to understand its
nature. The two aims in linguistics are
accuracy of knowledge and the best way of considering that knowledge. The two feed each other, but are to be judged
differently: the former can be tested empirically and the latter is judged
according to how illuminating or useful you find that interpretation.
The terms
describing parts of sentences carry no implications about the functions of
those parts towards producing the meaning of the sentence. Grammatical terms in the analysis of
sentences are only labels: they do not imply anything about states of affairs
in reality, and are connected with semantic concepts only insofar as some are
derived from what sometimes could be or could once have been one of their
functions.
So,
for example, the grammatical terms Singular and Present have only
that connection, and not a necessary one, with the concepts of singularity and
present time. We must not infer from the
mnemonic origin of some grammatical terms what the functions might be of
whatever the terms are assigned to.
So,
to describe a part of a sentence as Adverbial Clause or preposition
or vowel or Third Person
Plural Pluperfect Subjunctive Passive, or whatever else, does not define
its function ("Grammar does not tell us how a language must be constructed
in order to fulfil its purpose, in order to have such-and-such an effect on
human beings. It only describes and in no way explains the use of signs."
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, 496).
It
is not for grammar to turn up its nose at anything. So long as you are confident that a sentence
was meant (and that includes lies, quotations and woolly jargon) and that it
means something, then, although there might be much to say about it, such as
why you like or dislike it, how it could be expressed differently, when and to
whom it would be thought suitable or unsuitable, one thing you cannot say about
it is that it is ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ as a sentence of the language,
though it may be acceptable or unacceptable for one reason or another to this
person or that. There are no criteria,
however, for making such a judgment on purely linguistic grounds. This notion of linguistic ‘acceptability’ has
been invoked by some grammarians who offer the circular argument that a
sentence is acceptable if it conforms with the ideal set of rules that eventual
complete success in the grammatical analysis of the whole language would
produce.
Of
course, you can have preferences about all kinds of linguistic usage. It is only human and entirely healthy that
judgments should be made about the use of language, and the expression and discussion
of how one’s language should be used and how it should develop must be a vital
part of civilized culture. One hopes too
that learners of a foreign language (and of their own) will be taught what are
considered the best forms of that language.
There is, however, nothing in language itself from which we can decide
about such things.
The
acceptability of a sentence as part of language depends on the intention of the
originator of it: if the sentence was meant, it is part of language. We cannot
therefore accept a concocted or invented linguistic example as part of language
unless it was intended to produce its meaning in some real context. You may use such examples to teach someone
something about a language, but they will not be a real part of language from
which you can draw any linguistic conclusions.
The concept of
language as something abstracted from the actual use of it is mistaken. Language is no more than the words that
people have said, heard, written and read.
Grammar is not something in itself; it is not any part of language, nor
does it shape it in any way. Grammar is
just ideas about language for talking about it from a certain standpoint - from
a grammatical angle. This ought not to
need saying; yet much of the linguistics of recent times has presented things
otherwise: that grammar is something to be tested against what happens in
language or even against what might happen.
That
deterministic view of grammar is in line with the notion that there is some biological
constituent of human beings that makes it inevitable that human language-use is
as it happens to be. This is the theory
that linguistic structures are genetically innate. It must be said that there
is as yet no physiological evidence to support such an idea and how one would
recognize a correspondence between a grammatical structure and a genetic one
has not yet, to my knowledge, even been hinted at. It is at present just a speculative attempt
by some people to rationalize what they see as certain regularities across all
languages. The linguistic evidence that
drives some people to propose a genetic cause for it strikes me as
unsurprising, and I am at present content to regard it as what humans are
likely to do because of how they have developed rather than as what they are
predisposed to do because it is part of their development.
Since language is
such a vital part of human culture, it must follow that how we regard it is
vital too, and that we should not treat ideas about language as merely a
question of intellectual fashion, or assume blindly that bad ideas are bound to
provoke good ones in revolt. There are
principles to be argued over, one of which I hold to is that language should
not be analysed as if it were an abstract construction that allowed
possibilities, some of which have been realized, but that it is something in
which there are no possibilities apart from what has actually happened in it.
Finally,
for those who still think that meaning can be objectified, here is one last quote
from Wittgenstein:
"The
sense of the world must lie outside it." (Tractatus,
6.41).
BULLEY M.
(1991). Language and
philosophy. Cogito, Vol 5 No 3.
BULLEY M.
(1997). A wild gene chase. English Today, Vol
13 No 3.
BULLEY M.
(1998). Not to be found in the
brain. English Today, Vol 14 No3.
DANEŠ F. (1964). A three-level approach to
syntax. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague, Vol.I.
MILLER J.W (1980). The definition of the
thing.
WITTGENSTEIN L. (1961). Tractatus
logico-philosophicus, tr. Pears and McGuinness.
WITTGENSTEIN L. (1953). Philosophical
investigations.
WITTGENSTEIN
L. (1967). Zettel, tr. Anscombe.
The Editor welcomes your comments or contributions to discussion of
this article.
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